king of carrot flowers

farmer dan learned us all about shoulderless carrots and umbels today. we were bunching carrots and he pulled out one whose root was skinnier than the foilage coming out the top. "it doesn't have any shoudlers and you don't wanna eat that one because it's..... it's all woody and pithy inside. ya, you don't wanna eat that one. ya man, i threw that clown right outta the farmer's market." (said in farmer dan voice- a nasal oklahoma pitch that really carries over the field- you can hear farmer dan from a few hundred yards. usually he's having a conversation with himself. he's told the clown story every time i've worked with him for the past week, and usually it comes straight on the heels of any other topic- like carrot umbels, for example.)

-gots to get the johnny cash old timey album. it's being featured on ed's xm radio right now. one of the few worthy songs on this station, which is otherwise rife with "adult contemporary hits", whatever that means.

anyway, if a carrot stays skinny like that, that means it's going directly to seed instead of developing its root. it will sprout an 'umbel'- which is the round, spindly flower that you see on dillweed and fennel when it goes to seed, and this is where you get carrot seeds from. one plant can develop a few different umbels, but will usually have the 'king umbel' that is biggest and, i don;t know, has the most seeds, i guess. it's the king of carrot flowers.

ed and i have just decided that if george w bush were a character on deadwood he'd be farnum.

and a honey extraction update: farmer dan reports that all the bees in boulder county are in wyatt's backyard. as a result of the no-system-in-place-organizational-honey-extracting-failure, the hives sat in the backyard all night and into monday, allowing lots of time for the few bees that were there sunday to do their little bee dance for all the other bees in the area. bee party! but i guess the project was finally completed (save for pouring it into jars) and we ended up with 28 gallons. that's a lot of honey.


today i picked cherry tomatoes for a number of hours and ate every one that split, which turned out to be a lot. i then went to look at apartments with green tomato plant dust all over my arms and blackened hands.